basement films

'Made in USA' and Department of Defense codes imprinted on weapons fragments used to make American Tomahawks and seen in photos by Iran near bombed Minab school. Latest story w/ @trbrtc & @johnismay nytimes.com/2026/03/09/wor…

Very proud that ‘Gaza: Doctors Under Attack’ lnkd.in/eugcfhvE has been nominated by the @royaltelevisionsociety for Best Single Documentary congrats to all @basementfilms2 @senoritaramita @karimalishah and our everlasting respect to the medics & survivors in Gaza who shared their stories with us. 36 hospitals attacked, 1700 medics killed, countless others detained and tortured, and many many are still locked up. Those back in Gaza are still fighting to provide whatever service they can. Finally thanks to Channel4 for showing it after the cowardice elsewhere

I reported this story and have been working around the clock since Saturday to cover the deaths and obtain definitive evidence so that we can confidently assign responsibility. We've been reviewing photos of the dust covered bodies of children and verifying their names against the names scrawled on little coffins. We've been debunking false claims about the attack and that the harrowing cemetery photo isn't real. And while it appeared obvious to many early on that the U.S. or Israel hit the school, it takes days to sift through, pinpoint and analyze the evidence. It took four days before a new satellite image we ordered came through so we could confidently assess the damage and the types of weapons used. All that reporting and cross checking and the production of the visuals showing it takes time. But it ultimately allows us to more confidently assert U.S. responsibility, explain our rationale and add to the body of reporting that officials should be challenged with. It's easy to critique a headline, and I agree language matters, but you diminish the reporting. We're not justifying anything, we're stating where the reporting points responsibility, and quoting legal experts on the laws of armed conflict. Here's a gift link nytimes.com/2026/03/05/wor…

Please watch our Basement Films new 3-part series “Hostage” here lnkd.in/eTTdHkgu Directed by Marian Mohamed, and co-produced with Story Films Limited, it tells the extraordinary story of John Cantlie, who along with his friend James Foley, was kidnapped by jihadists and ultimately held by ISIS in Syria. James was horrifically executed, but John survived. It is a tribute to him and all journalists who take the ultimate risks to go to places few will venture to so we can be better informed. The series builds on the amazing reporting of the Anthony Loyd and Manveen Rana podcast Last Man Standing. It was co exec/produced with Peter Beard. The series made by a brilliant team at Story Films Limited and Basement Films. A big thank you to @Simon Young for commissioning the series and pushing it to be the best it could, to Prash Naik at Creators Counsel (as ever), Kezia Tomsett for the amazing score and the team at TVC Soho. And a special thank you to all the contributors and friends/colleagues of John and James who helped make the series. Josh Wilkins Alec Webb Samantha Tilyard Sasha K. Martin McDonnell Ellen Green Shana Kemp Firas Itani Jacqueline Edwards Holly Mina Jones Crissania R

The Committee to Protect Journalists has found more journalists and media workers were killed in 2025 than any year since its records began 30 years ago (2024 was the previous record). Israel was responsible for two-thirds of deaths in both years cpj.org/special-report…

In August 2023 our film "Sri Lanka's Easter Bombings" was broadcast by @Channel4 - in it we set out allegations from multiple insiders and whistle blowers that senior Sri Lankan politicians and security chiefs were involved in a conspiracy around the Easter Bombings in 2019 that killed 253 people in hotels and churches across Sri Lanka. Our insiders named two senior Sri Lankans- a politician named Pillayan, and the head of state security at the time Suresh Salley. Suresh Salley was today arrested on charges of "conspiracy and aiding and abetting" the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, and joins PIllayan who has been in prison since last year. Please watch our film - made with the co-opertion of very brave Sri Lankans - here channel4.com/programmes/sri…

The investigation and arrest of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor is an extraordinary moment, and to be done effectively it will have to dig deep into the establishment and its protection of him. The main witnesses to any alleged crimes will be the police, in the form of his close protection officers, who went everywhere with him at all times, and the palace, in the form of the structure around him that ensured all legal moves and avenues against him were effectively closed down for over a decade. Any cover up is theirs as well as his. I came across Prince Andrew twice as a journalist and both times he was surrounded by protection officers. The first time was in Pretoria at an event with the UK High Commissioner; Andrew cruised the room followed by his protection, blatantly checking out all the women. The second time was on a plane to Chicago, which when he decided no longer suited his timetable he disembarked from with his protection officers who whisked him back to Windsor whilst the rest of us sat on the tarmac as they searched for airmiles Andy’s luggage. When I was at Channel 4 News we tried repeatedly to investigate Andrew and particularly that photograph. Even after Epstein’s conviction and emergence of “that photo”, they rounded the wagons, having refused to receive US legal papers from his alleged victims. After repeated attempts the police admitted they had looked into the circumstances of the photo before dropping the investigation. It felt like a coup at the time, but the police and palace seemed to go to extraordinary lengths to obfuscate and stonewall all media enquiries, before the royals ultimately paid millions to a woman whom he denied ever meeting. As editor I found the monarchy and conventions of Royal coverage the hardest to comprehend. When, in 2015 we were offered an interview with Charles I was keen to do it to ask about his brother, but we were told we had to sign a draconian 15 page contract that essentially ceded all editorial control to the palace. Indeed, the signatures of previous tv execs littered the pro forma contract which gave Prince Charles the right to final cut, before broadcast and release. After refusing to sign (I took legal advice as I thought it broke OFCOM rules by giving final editorial control to the interviewee) they refused the interview; the contract appeared here independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-n…. When Charles was seen to have re-entered public life with a series of spider-letters, I got Michael Crick to doorstep him channel4.com/news/prince-ch…. I was removed from my tenuous membership of the royal broadcast pool. That was the end of our relationship with the Royals; Nnewsnight & Emily Maitlis then got their extraordinary Andrew interview and the rest should have been history; but all this has still taken nearly a decade to happen.

Up for Best Current Affairs Programme is Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, @Basement_Films for @Channel4 ✨Join us on the 4th of February, book your table now! bit.ly/BA2026Tables #BA2026 #BroadcastAwards #Production #TV #Broadcast #TVProduction #ChildrenTV #Comedy #Drama #Documentary #News #CurrentAffairs #Streamers #Daytime #Entertainment #PostProduction #RealityTV #Sports #Broadcasters

Our friends in Gaza, 250+ of whom have been killed doing their jobs, won an @iemmys award last night for "KIll Zone: Inside Gaza" which we made for Channel 4.
We are beyond proud that this film - one of the first to be made purely in Gaza was recognised for this honour, its 8th major award including @bafta @amnesty @press_gazette @broadcastnow_mbi @rorypecktrust award.
We want to pay tribute to our DOP @jaber_badwan and the 11 other filmmakers who continued to risk everything to document the atrocities.
Thank you to all @basementfilms2 @vanessa_bowles for directing @melaniequig_ for pushing through the thousands of hours of blood drenched bodies and helping make sense of the carnage, @thompwalker for bringing all the heart, Andy Kemp for further editing @tvcsoho for the post @ramacqueen95 for keeping it all together, @anabellemarshall_directs for incredible support, and menna_hj for the spirit, for putting up with it all.

This was our first film in Gaza, not the one that @bbcnews dropped but made for @channel4 and we thank them especially @nevmab & Jo Potts.

Watch this space as our latest film "Gaza: Doctors Under Attack", yes the one dropped by @bbcnews has been nominated for multiple awards and won the @societyofeditorsuk investigation award last week.

Very proud that our Basement Films film “Gaza: Doctors Under Attack” made for BBC News but dropped by them and then run by Channel 4 won the Society of Editors Broadcast Investigation of the Year : as ever this award is first and foremost for our team in Gaza led by Jabir Badwan & Osama Al Ahli, but it was brilliant made by Ramita Navai Karim Shah Melanie Quigley Robert Angus Macqueen Andy Kemp Menna Hijazi Leah Gowns and post done at TVC Soho. We are relieved that the killing for now has slowed if not ended in Gaza, but following events at the BBC this week it’s a reminder that the board there and the leadership there first praised and approved this film and then dropped and traduced its makers. We want a strong BBC News - the dropping of this film was a strong signal of its weakness and disfunctionality. Also pleased to see Cathy Newman won Broadcaster of the year - her investigation we started 7 years ago Channel 4 News should never have taken this long to be acted on; she is indefatigable

Gaza children dying as they wait for Israel to enable evacuations bbc.in/4o3TS8F

Very proud @Basement_Films has been nominated for 2 @pressgazette British Journalism awards for ‘Gaza: Doctors Under Attack'? channel4.com/programmes/gaz… thanks to our colleagues in Gaza & @Channel4 & @zeteo_news & to those @BBCNews who worked & supported it despite them not running it

I came back today. I thought I had known despair before, but what I saw today is beyond despair. It is not grief, nor horror, nor pain. It is something colder, a stillness where even God seems to have withdrawn His hand. The sky was impossibly blue. The kind of blue that mocks you, that makes you wonder whether beauty itself is a crime. I walked through streets that no longer exist, streets that were my childhood. They are now a wilderness of stone, wire, and dust. A man stood on a heap, a neighbor, I think. He pointed and said, “It’s here.” I asked him how far. He looked down. And I understood: my house was beneath his feet. I lifted my phone, as if the machine could recognize what I could not. The screen glowed; there was nothing to see. The earth had swallowed the distances. Even the smell of home was gone. It was as if the thread connecting me to life itself had been cut. I dug with my hands. The dust burned. My palms bled. My mother had told me: “Search for anything we can save.” And so I obeyed her like a son obeys the last voice that still believes there is meaning in obedience. From a house that once cost my father one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, a lifetime of labor, of hope, of decency, I found two things: a knife, and a pillow. Two relics of civilization. One for necessity, one for illusion. That is what remains of man. I sat in the ruins, the blue of my shirt turned gray with ash, and I thought: this is the end not of a city, but of meaning itself. I thought of my parents, their hands, their faith in honest work. How will they bear this? How will any man bear seeing his father’s roof turned into dust by a stranger’s hands, hands that will never know the names of those they destroyed? But what tears me apart more than ruin is silence. No one speaks to us. No one tells us where to go, who will rebuild, or who is responsible. The politicians talk of victories, the generals of strategy, the world of peace and progress. But none of them live here among the ashes. None of them stand where I stand, sifting through their own dead. And those who claim to represent us, where are they? Where is the money they collected in our name, the promises they made before the cameras, the slogans they wrote while we buried our children? Who among them will come to this ruin and say: Forgive us, we failed you? Not one. They sit in offices with clean shirts, counting our corpses as figures on paper. They say “reconstruction,” “aid,” “negotiations,” as though the vocabulary of power could fill the emptiness of a mother’s bed. I tell you the truth: there is no crime greater than indifference. The murderer at least acknowledges the victim. But those who look away, they kill the soul itself. I brushed the dust from my shirt, though I knew it was useless. I wanted to see if there was still color left in the world. There wasn’t. The blue had become the color of mourning. I looked at my hands. They were shaking, not from fear, but from the unbearable realization that we have become expendable to the world. Our suffering is entertainment, our death a policy, our endurance a statistic. I wept then, openly, shamelessly. I, who once believed in the dignity of suffering, now see that dignity itself has been annihilated. There is nothing noble in being forgotten. If you are reading this, do not admire the style or the language. Lower your head, and weep. Because this dust, this silence, this cry, is what remains of us.

“We’ve got enough food to feed everyone in #Gaza for between two and three months, and the population is starving. We’ve got shelter items for hundreds of thousands of people, blankets for over a million people,” our Sam Rose tells @‌MiddleEastEye. UNRWA stands ready to deliver life-saving aid as people return to their homes across Gaza following the #ceasefire. Allowing UNRWA to distribute supplies is essential to meet urgent needs and support recovery. Full story: middleeasteye.net/news/more-5000…

This is Khanyounis, where I live. Completely destroyed.

We have returned, like we’ll always do. 📍Gaza City

Good points @krishgm I would also add this; In the next few days it’s likely that international journalists will enter Gaza, after an unprecedented ban by the Israeli government during these two long years of killing. Almost immediately, and quite rightly, those familiar faces whom we still watch and trust on our TV news will appear and report from Inside Gaza. In the rush to see and report for themselves I hope they don’t forget that this has been experienced, seen, recorded and reported in real time to the world by Palestinian journalists who have been killed in greater numbers than in all other recent conflicts combined, in the greatest feat of journalism of our times. 270+ killed, many clearly and deliberately targeted, some announced by their killers as such. None of these killings independently investigated. The Western media’s obsession, in particular the BBC’s, in their not being allowed in and constantly saying so helped frame the story exactly as intended, as contested, and degraded the status of Palestinian journalists who were literally being killed trying to tell the story, undermining any reporting they did. An example of this was this morning on the BBC Today programme. The presenter said to the UN’s Tom Fletcher – “Journalists are still prohibited by Israel from entering Gaza- have you heard from your people in Gaza that the ceasefire has begun ?” In the back end of his answer Tom Fletcher replied “we need the international media to get back in and tell the world what is happening and hold us to account”. Both would no doubt contest this strongly, but neither mentioned any reporting from Palestinian journalists on the ground, and both implied, as the BBC has throughout, that only when international journalists get in will we know what has really happened. So please, when you get in, remember that you are not on a mission of discovery, avoid the rush to claim an exclusive; try not to say “the full horror is revealed”; it is a revelation only to you, everything was shown, day by day in real time. It will be shocking; but when expressing your shock imagine the shock and then horror of those experiencing it and telling the story who were then not heard or believed. When you film the pan and the pull out and the drone shot across miles of rubble, remember that every angle and every shot has been filmed before and sent out and seen, and that whilst your organisation may not have shown it in its fullest extent the internet via social media did.

"It was horrendous when I went [to Gaza] in February and met kids who had had amputations without anesthetics. It's horrendous that kids are dying of starvation, affecting their bodies, consuming their own organs. What we give them to try and avoid that is this kind of high protein peanut butter paste. And we've been told we can't bring peanut butter in because it's a luxury, because Hamas might try to steal the peanut butter." A harrowing account of the situation in Gaza from @UNReliefChief

“They didn't want the hospital to keep working. That was his flaw. He kept the hospital going.” Israel has detained Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya for over 250 days. A new film from @ajfaultlines follows the doctor from his work in a collapsing medical system to his arrest and abuse.

An Israeli conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ilan Volkov has been arrested at a protest near the Israel-Gaza border. Last week, a clip of him at the Royal Albert Hall condemning Israel’s actions in the almost two-year long war in Gaza went viral.